Education

The best metro areas for off-campus enjoyment.

How suggestible are the nation’s college students? Very: Boston College German studies professor Michael Resler went searching for a way to boost flagging interest in his “German Literature of the High Middle Ages’’ class a few years ago, and settled on the idea of simply giving the course a sexier name. The resulting “Knights, Castles, […]

Overall, college tuition goes up. Only. Endlessly. Even during times of severe and widespread economic insecurity. Ron Lieber of The New York Times devoted his Saturday Your Money column to asking why, which led to an informative interview with Daniel H. Weiss, president of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. We all know why schools like Harvard […]

On Friday Fox Business’ website ran a piece on options for those looking for a low- or no-tuition college experience: work colleges, work-study programs, and service academies, to name a few. But the part that really caught my eyes was this bit at the end on loan-free schools: Students stressing over post-graduation loan repayment, fear […]

Happy Labor Day, everyone. Here are a couple holiday-relevant items out of Detroit: the faculty strike at Oakland University, which has kept classes from being held since Thursday, appears close to resolution. And Stephen Henderson of The Detroit Free Press, reflecting on labor unrest at OU and among city teachers and workers (the latter of […]

David Leonhardt doesn’t buy any of the sentiments floating around that college degrees may not be worth the debt one must incur to attain them these days, and his response (written in reaction to this post on The Choice) is that this idea “flies in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence”: In fact, […]

After a pretty good Wall Street Journal article on the huge increase in the amount of federal student loans disbursed for the 2008-09 academic year, Daniel Indiviglio argued at The Atlantic that the federal government should be more like private loan companies when it comes to deciding how much particular students should be allowed to […]

I agree with most of what James Mazol is saying here: Any recent graduate of upper-middle class origins can attest to the existence and power of [the stigma against not going to college]. For us, four-year college was never an option but mandatory; frankly, many of our parents spent unholy sums to avoid the shame […]

“Jason Becker” on the issue of colleges lying to U.S. News: One has to wonder why USNews depends on this reporting for accuracy rather than going to the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data Set (www.nces.ed.gov/ipeds), where this information already freely exists and is reported to the federal government each year. I think we’re far less likely […]

By now, I’m sure you’ve already read Kevin Carey’s great piece on the threat online college courses could end up posing to traditional, brick-and-mortar institutions of higher education. Several times, in fact. Now, Inside Higher Ed has up a story that serves as an interesting followup to Kevin’s piece, and which is also very much […]